Moroccan Tajines

Guest Blogger: Renata Toth To continue with another typical Moroccan dish, I’d suggest choosing a delicious tajine. Tajines are those pyramid-shaped cooking pots Moroccans use for cooking. The specialty of this is that all the ingredients are added one another, allowing for the different cooking times, and then basically cooked together, which gives an extraordinary mixture of all the flavours, the outcome of which will be a full and tasteful meal. In case you do not have this tajine, you can just as well cook it in a pot. A meat and fruit tajine would just do nicely after this thick soup. You’ll need the following: 1 middle-sized onion approx 4 cl oil 1 kg meat, mostly beef is used 2 cinnamon sticks, or ground cinnamon ½ tsp ginger salt and pepper 1 litre of water a little bit of powdered cinnamon, if you have been using sticks above 4 sp honey 200 gr dried peaches 250 gr pineapple, cut in small dices 250 gr pears cut in small dices 100 gr butter 5 sp sugar 2 bananas 100 gr breadcrumbs First, in a pot, put together the onion cut into thin pieces, the oil, meat, 1 cinnamon stick (or a little powdered cinnamon), salt and pepper, ginger and the powdered cinnamon (in case you used sticks above). Mix it well until the meat is browned, then add water, cover and cook for 35 minutes approximately. Afterwards, add the honey and let it cook for a little while, but keep some sauce. While the meat is cooking, wash and peel the peaches, and cook for 10 minutes. Then, drain them and mix in the mixer. Put the pineapple cubes and pear pieces in a pan with a small amount of butter, add the sugar and the other cinnamon stick, and let it cook until the juice evaporates completely and the fruits are slightly caramelised. Peel the bananas, cut them in circles. Melt butter in a pan. Cover every pieces of banana with breadcrumbs and fry them on both sides in the butter. Serve the meat on a plate and surround it with the fruits and the peach sauce, and sprinkle with sesame seeds. To accompany this dish, prepare a nice fruit juice! For example, take half a kilo of strawberries, sugar according to your taste, ice cubes and half a litre of orange juice, mix them together in the blender and serve in long glasses! To be stylish, you can dip the glasses into sugar as well and maybe add a little umbrella as decoration! For more recipes visit http://www.marialiberati.com Get your copy of The Basic Art of Italian Cooking: Holidays & Special Occasions-2nd edition